Black-Sholes doesn't claim to predict the future, nor did anyone say it did. It proves that the cost of an option will be the same as it's current trading price less the current market price of time (the interest rate).
The axioms are such basic assertions as "Humans make choices" and "other things being equal, humans prefer (desirable) things sooner rather than later". This stuff is extremely well studied and we have no reason to believe it's wrong.
You could levy the same arguments at physics but you don't see anyone going "LOLOLOLOL Gravity LOLOLOLOL". It still models planetary motion extremely well, does it not? And any improvements aren't likely to disprove our current understanding, but instead expand upon established knowledge. This is how science works, people.
Arguably economics is more provable than kinematics: Proof by contradiction: "Individuals don't act". But I, an individual, just made an assertion, that carries a meaning, therefore, the assertion must be wrong and individuals do act. The fact it's an action implies I chose it over other possible actions, therefore, I have some sort of preference. And so on. So yes, you can have theorems in economics. They are fewer in number than I would like, but they exist, and include such things as the laws of supply and demand, increasing marginal cost, the comparative advantage, and time-value (which Black-Scholes proves).
Fatal flaw with your logic: If people anticipated prices going up, then prices would already be that high, minus the price of time. This is a mathematical theorem. Likewise, if people know that Bitcoin will achieve mass adoption in the future, they will buy the currency and hold it, until they believe it reaches its peak, at which point they spend it. This is how new money effectively enters circulation, or to be more accurate, this is how price levels remain stable, regardless of the method of money allocation (the reason that central bank inflation is wrong is, even if predictable, the created money effectively steals from the existing base of savings to be given to creditors, banks, and the politically well-connected -- the so-called inflation tax). If Bitcoin's price is far below this level, this is due to the perceived risk: People holding Bitcoin will be greatly rewarded if it does achieve adoption, at the risk that they lose everything.
Another way to put it is: The total amount of natural resources at our disposal isn't increasing, why should the money supply?
Before a US central bank oversaw the money supply, prices largely remained stable, the price of commodities remained stable or went down (as manufacturing methods improved). Post-gold-standard, though? Prices go through the roof.
Your description of prices suggests that they somehow form a positive feedback loop. They most certainly do not. The only aspect of prices that could be spoken of in this form is speculation, and since there are limited resources to speculate with, bubbles always burst.
Giving people a democracy would give them the power to pass any law they want. Let me rephrase that: Tyranny of the majority. This does not limit power, it's the worst form of it.
The Senate limits power: It means additional measures are required to pass a law. It's not as if the House or the Senate can write laws, the House and the Senate have to write the laws, and agree on them, and vote, and send it to the president. You appear to be under the impression that the exhaustive list of political systems is that one person uses force on everyone, or everyone uses force on everyone. This is wrong: How about no one uses force on anyone? This is the explicit goal of the Constitution.
Judges don't write law, they decide if law that already exists applies to a particular case brought before them (they can't even go out and charge people with crimes!). They can, however, say that a certain law is void because congress had no power to write it (and therefore, it's unenforceable, the Constitution being the supreme law of the land and all that). This doesn't sound like very much power at all.
The president can't write law either, he gets to enforce the laws passed by Congress, that are among the several enumerated powers granted to Congress, and run the military. By default, he has very little power at all. The presidency is explicitly not a monarchy, the president, if you weren't aware, has no power to run the economy, no power to command people how to live, and no power to write the law, so you are sadly mistaken.
What specific examples of powers is this "aristocracy" (lawfully) using? Can you name one? No? If you wanted to prove your point, you should have actually quoted the Constitution and the parts that gives the Federal government all the powers that you claim it does. I don't believe you will find any passages supporting your position.
The purpose of the Constitution (and the Articles of Confederation before it) is to minimize the power of the Federal government, this is both the explicit goal and end effect. This necessarily implies not being a democracy.
Major Citation Needed on how this is somehow "elitist". Again, the sole purpose of the Constitution is to limit power.
Of all the people who were at the Constitutional Convention, go and count how many were actually slave owners. Hint: Not many.
How does one "live as libertarian" anyways? It's a political philosophy, the proper role of government and all that (specifically, the proper use of force, not "what's the best way to run my business"). Go read the Declaration of Independence, even the current Constitution that you say was "counter-revolutionary" (did you somehow forget George Washington served as the first president under this Constitution? You know his role in the Revolution, right?), the Federalist Papers, most of Wealth of Nations, the so-called Anti-Federalist Papers. Sure there were differing ideas on how to best bring about such a society, but by no means were they statists! (Or anything else far removed from that end of the spectrum.)
I never mentioned anything about "intelligent students", what point are you making?
And really? You can't name any other liberal/libertarian figures? Like, you know, every single economist ever? (You know, the people who are actually authoritative when it comes to studying decision making and scarcity)? The people who founded the country and the vast majority of other Enlightenment figures? I'd think that's kind of important.
Could you possibly be even more condescending? I'd appreciate it, thanks.
A developer can be an end user. An end user may wish to have a developer make changes for them. They may even wish to redistribute it. Your definition of "end user" is excessively narrow.
Okay, but you don't need the GPL to do any of this. A free license allows for all the things you just described. A user can redistribute the program, make changes to it, modify any sources, etc. And unlike the GPL, the developer isn't restricted in what they can do with their code.
Suppose a developer writes a program from scratch, licenses the work under the GPL, and distributes only compiled binaries by selling them. The developer can do this because he entirely and wholly owns the copyright, and can change it on his whim, it wouldn't make any sense to file a lawsuit, there's no injured party. Now you have "free software" that you're not allowed to redistribute because you don't have the sources. Contradiction of terms much? This proves the GPL cannot be "free software".
Relevant because the claim "it protects the end-user" is bunk. The exclusive job of a copyright license is to permit distribution. Well, distribution isn't something that end-users do, it's something that developers do. Therefore if you're license doesn't permit distribution in some cases, you're only restricting the freedoms of developers. This is, by definition, non-free.
I'm talking about an EULA, not a copyright license. An EULA is supposed to restrict what the end-user is legally allowed to do with their own program on their own computer (but they're not making any agreement in return, it's only a promise, and should be legally unenforceable). A copyright license is legally incapable of restricting what an end-user is doing, it can only permit (re)distribution, nothing more.
You don't just "close off the sources", once you've published source code, it's like, always out there. It's kind of hard to scrub stuff off the Internet, I hope you realize.
The ICANN would exist without copyright, patent, and even trademark laws. They could exist without a state -- it's entirely voluntary. It appears you've fallen into the same trap as many leftists: "I can't imagine how the world (or the ICANN) would work without the government, therefore it can't work."
It's entirely possible for a name registration organization to have a private rule that says "Hey, you can't claim to be or use the name of a well-known entity that you are not." Hell, Facebook and Twitter have these same rules.
You don't need a license to be "forced to respect the rights of end users". If you want to respect the rights of end users, then, you know, don't include a licensing agreement. It's not as if the GPL has a legal monopoly on this paradigm. (An even better idea is not make that crap enforceable in courts, it's not). It's not that hard and you don't need a copyright license to do it.
I don't see what the "philosophy of the FSF" has to do with it. What matters is what the license says and the extent that it's enforceable with copyright law (many parts are not, dynamic linking, AGPL in particular, sorry FSF, but "conveyance" is not a legal term with any meaning, copyright law only cares about "distribution" which is very well defined in statute).
Much of the software (and entertainment) industry wouldn't operate like they do without the current patent, copyright law that we have -- not capitalism. The crony capitalism of the copyright, patent-based industries spawned the equally crony capitalism of the copyleft "free" licenses (not actually free by any definition, it's still restrictive and subjects you to lawsuits for failing to do any number of things).
I don't see what the UN part has to do with it. The rules are voluntary, period.
Now I don't even like the ICANN, but I don't like a number of corporations, and what else is a person to do, it's not wrong to do, certainly.
Fact is, he did wait until retiring before asking any organization to do this. To refrain from using one's powers as a politician is, I think, very honorable.
Ron is not using the State to acquire RonPaul.com. He could have brought a lawsuit in US government courts, but he did not. He is seeking to have ICANN enforce its own rules against cybersquatting, including the rule against registering a famous person’s name and making money off it. Anyone registering a URL agrees to keep all the rules, just as he must pay a recurring fee. A URL is not private property in the normal sense. It is a license, and ICANN is a private, non-profit organization.
Ron is not calling on the UN. ICANN has four approved arbitration organizations. Because the RP.com guys registered Ron's name in Australia, the international arbitration option must be used. Yes, it is associated with the UN. Too bad, but one must play the cards one is dealt. The UN itself is not involved, though note—whatever else is wrong with it—the UN is not a State.
Why did Ron wait so long to bring this claim? He did not feel he could do so as a public official. Once he became a private citizen again, he was freed.
Read the rest of my comment. You're confusing wanting to drive to work with enjoying driving to work. Are you seriously trying to tell me you want to walk or even bike several hours all the way to work, and several hours back, and all the consequences that implies (e.g. possibly arriving late, having far less free time)? No, you don't, you drive to work instead because you want that more than walking, all other things being equal.
It is necessarily true that if you do something, you want to do it (more than any other alternative). This is what economists care about. This is by definition. You are losing a by definition argument.
People do want to drive to work, otherwise they wouldn't do it. The fact that they spend time driving to work, and even plan ahead to be able to do so, necessarily implies that they want to. This is the economist's definition of "want", and the fact it is something they spend time planning to do means it is a need (need = highest ranked want at any given point in time).
Therefore the rest of your argument cannot follow. Nor is there any real basis for your arguments that follow, there's a long precedence for privately owned and maintained roads, even today in the US. It was among the first forms of commercial transportation, even (it was things like canals that have historically been government-funded, not roads!).
Why it matters is because public versus private goods is the entire point the cited passage. You started this by arguing that air somehow was a non-scarce good (i.e. can potentially be used up until there is "no more air left"). In doing so you provided an example of a free public good, which is neither scarce, nor rivalrous, nor excludable, as the passage requires. Do you have half a brain to be able to rationalize the fact that no matter how hard we breathe, we cannot "use up" the air like we use up hamburgers or freeways? Did that even cross your mind, yes or no?
You don't need HTML to use any of the APIs, they're just APIs that any library could choose to implement. DOM, WebRTC, IndexedDB, Canvas, RDF Interfaces, and plenty more all have notable non-Webbrowser implementations. You don't actually even need ECMAScript, the definitions are specified with WebIDL specifically so they can be implemented in Java and C++, too: DOM API is pretty much the standard API for reading XML data in any programming language that has an XML parser (it's the one that specifies getElementById, etc).
And bear in mind there's other ECMAScript APIs too. Khronos Group defines UInt8Array, etc, designed for use with GL. But you don't find that in ECMA-262.
WebRTC is not "HTML5". It's an ECMAScript API, and you can use it in any ECMAScript environment with the API, including any HTML version, and hopefully, in the future, desktop applications.
The American Revolution was won because the Americans had access to weapons as good or better than the British military.
The second amendment exists precisely to protect one from governments, anything less is auxiliary.
I'm making the subtle point yes, yes it unconstitutional. Because the use of them against innocents is already illegal, so how could mere possession be? And consider, you can make "chemical and biological weapons" with stuff under your sink.
Slashdot Mirror
Black-Sholes doesn't claim to predict the future, nor did anyone say it did. It proves that the cost of an option will be the same as it's current trading price less the current market price of time (the interest rate).
The axioms are such basic assertions as "Humans make choices" and "other things being equal, humans prefer (desirable) things sooner rather than later". This stuff is extremely well studied and we have no reason to believe it's wrong.
You could levy the same arguments at physics but you don't see anyone going "LOLOLOLOL Gravity LOLOLOLOL". It still models planetary motion extremely well, does it not? And any improvements aren't likely to disprove our current understanding, but instead expand upon established knowledge. This is how science works, people.
Arguably economics is more provable than kinematics: Proof by contradiction: "Individuals don't act". But I, an individual, just made an assertion, that carries a meaning, therefore, the assertion must be wrong and individuals do act. The fact it's an action implies I chose it over other possible actions, therefore, I have some sort of preference. And so on. So yes, you can have theorems in economics. They are fewer in number than I would like, but they exist, and include such things as the laws of supply and demand, increasing marginal cost, the comparative advantage, and time-value (which Black-Scholes proves).
Fatal flaw with your logic: If people anticipated prices going up, then prices would already be that high, minus the price of time. This is a mathematical theorem. Likewise, if people know that Bitcoin will achieve mass adoption in the future, they will buy the currency and hold it, until they believe it reaches its peak, at which point they spend it. This is how new money effectively enters circulation, or to be more accurate, this is how price levels remain stable, regardless of the method of money allocation (the reason that central bank inflation is wrong is, even if predictable, the created money effectively steals from the existing base of savings to be given to creditors, banks, and the politically well-connected -- the so-called inflation tax). If Bitcoin's price is far below this level, this is due to the perceived risk: People holding Bitcoin will be greatly rewarded if it does achieve adoption, at the risk that they lose everything.
Another way to put it is: The total amount of natural resources at our disposal isn't increasing, why should the money supply?
Before a US central bank oversaw the money supply, prices largely remained stable, the price of commodities remained stable or went down (as manufacturing methods improved). Post-gold-standard, though? Prices go through the roof.
Your description of prices suggests that they somehow form a positive feedback loop. They most certainly do not. The only aspect of prices that could be spoken of in this form is speculation, and since there are limited resources to speculate with, bubbles always burst.
Giving people a democracy would give them the power to pass any law they want. Let me rephrase that: Tyranny of the majority. This does not limit power, it's the worst form of it.
The Senate limits power: It means additional measures are required to pass a law. It's not as if the House or the Senate can write laws, the House and the Senate have to write the laws, and agree on them, and vote, and send it to the president. You appear to be under the impression that the exhaustive list of political systems is that one person uses force on everyone, or everyone uses force on everyone. This is wrong: How about no one uses force on anyone? This is the explicit goal of the Constitution.
Judges don't write law, they decide if law that already exists applies to a particular case brought before them (they can't even go out and charge people with crimes!). They can, however, say that a certain law is void because congress had no power to write it (and therefore, it's unenforceable, the Constitution being the supreme law of the land and all that). This doesn't sound like very much power at all.
The president can't write law either, he gets to enforce the laws passed by Congress, that are among the several enumerated powers granted to Congress, and run the military. By default, he has very little power at all. The presidency is explicitly not a monarchy, the president, if you weren't aware, has no power to run the economy, no power to command people how to live, and no power to write the law, so you are sadly mistaken.
What specific examples of powers is this "aristocracy" (lawfully) using? Can you name one? No? If you wanted to prove your point, you should have actually quoted the Constitution and the parts that gives the Federal government all the powers that you claim it does. I don't believe you will find any passages supporting your position.
The purpose of the Constitution (and the Articles of Confederation before it) is to minimize the power of the Federal government, this is both the explicit goal and end effect. This necessarily implies not being a democracy.
Major Citation Needed on how this is somehow "elitist". Again, the sole purpose of the Constitution is to limit power.
Of all the people who were at the Constitutional Convention, go and count how many were actually slave owners. Hint: Not many.
How does one "live as libertarian" anyways? It's a political philosophy, the proper role of government and all that (specifically, the proper use of force, not "what's the best way to run my business"). Go read the Declaration of Independence, even the current Constitution that you say was "counter-revolutionary" (did you somehow forget George Washington served as the first president under this Constitution? You know his role in the Revolution, right?), the Federalist Papers, most of Wealth of Nations, the so-called Anti-Federalist Papers. Sure there were differing ideas on how to best bring about such a society, but by no means were they statists! (Or anything else far removed from that end of the spectrum.)
I never mentioned anything about "intelligent students", what point are you making?
And really? You can't name any other liberal/libertarian figures? Like, you know, every single economist ever? (You know, the people who are actually authoritative when it comes to studying decision making and scarcity)? The people who founded the country and the vast majority of other Enlightenment figures? I'd think that's kind of important.
Note the difference between "Iraq" and "Iraqis". There's a difference between states owning something and individuals owning something.
I'm sorry, have you been to a college campus recently? It's almost the exclusive domain of anarcho-communists and such.
Could you possibly be even more condescending? I'd appreciate it, thanks.
Okay, but you don't need the GPL to do any of this. A free license allows for all the things you just described. A user can redistribute the program, make changes to it, modify any sources, etc. And unlike the GPL, the developer isn't restricted in what they can do with their code.
Suppose a developer writes a program from scratch, licenses the work under the GPL, and distributes only compiled binaries by selling them. The developer can do this because he entirely and wholly owns the copyright, and can change it on his whim, it wouldn't make any sense to file a lawsuit, there's no injured party. Now you have "free software" that you're not allowed to redistribute because you don't have the sources. Contradiction of terms much? This proves the GPL cannot be "free software".
Relevant because the claim "it protects the end-user" is bunk. The exclusive job of a copyright license is to permit distribution. Well, distribution isn't something that end-users do, it's something that developers do. Therefore if you're license doesn't permit distribution in some cases, you're only restricting the freedoms of developers. This is, by definition, non-free.
I'm talking about an EULA, not a copyright license. An EULA is supposed to restrict what the end-user is legally allowed to do with their own program on their own computer (but they're not making any agreement in return, it's only a promise, and should be legally unenforceable). A copyright license is legally incapable of restricting what an end-user is doing, it can only permit (re)distribution, nothing more.
You don't just "close off the sources", once you've published source code, it's like, always out there. It's kind of hard to scrub stuff off the Internet, I hope you realize.
The ICANN would exist without copyright, patent, and even trademark laws. They could exist without a state -- it's entirely voluntary. It appears you've fallen into the same trap as many leftists: "I can't imagine how the world (or the ICANN) would work without the government, therefore it can't work."
It's entirely possible for a name registration organization to have a private rule that says "Hey, you can't claim to be or use the name of a well-known entity that you are not." Hell, Facebook and Twitter have these same rules.
You don't need a license to be "forced to respect the rights of end users". If you want to respect the rights of end users, then, you know, don't include a licensing agreement. It's not as if the GPL has a legal monopoly on this paradigm. (An even better idea is not make that crap enforceable in courts, it's not). It's not that hard and you don't need a copyright license to do it.
I don't see what the "philosophy of the FSF" has to do with it. What matters is what the license says and the extent that it's enforceable with copyright law (many parts are not, dynamic linking, AGPL in particular, sorry FSF, but "conveyance" is not a legal term with any meaning, copyright law only cares about "distribution" which is very well defined in statute).
Much of the software (and entertainment) industry wouldn't operate like they do without the current patent, copyright law that we have -- not capitalism. The crony capitalism of the copyright, patent-based industries spawned the equally crony capitalism of the copyleft "free" licenses (not actually free by any definition, it's still restrictive and subjects you to lawsuits for failing to do any number of things).
The rules are voluntary because no one is going to come to your house with guns pointed if you decline.
Unlike, you know, paying taxes, negotiations with cartels, etc.
I don't see what the UN part has to do with it. The rules are voluntary, period.
Now I don't even like the ICANN, but I don't like a number of corporations, and what else is a person to do, it's not wrong to do, certainly.
Fact is, he did wait until retiring before asking any organization to do this. To refrain from using one's powers as a politician is, I think, very honorable.
To quote Lew Rockwell:
Ron is not using the State to acquire RonPaul.com. He could have brought a lawsuit in US government courts, but he did not. He is seeking to have ICANN enforce its own rules against cybersquatting, including the rule against registering a famous person’s name and making money off it. Anyone registering a URL agrees to keep all the rules, just as he must pay a recurring fee. A URL is not private property in the normal sense. It is a license, and ICANN is a private, non-profit organization.
Ron is not calling on the UN. ICANN has four approved arbitration organizations. Because the RP.com guys registered Ron's name in Australia, the international arbitration option must be used. Yes, it is associated with the UN. Too bad, but one must play the cards one is dealt. The UN itself is not involved, though note—whatever else is wrong with it—the UN is not a State.
Why did Ron wait so long to bring this claim? He did not feel he could do so as a public official. Once he became a private citizen again, he was freed.
Read the rest of my comment. You're confusing wanting to drive to work with enjoying driving to work. Are you seriously trying to tell me you want to walk or even bike several hours all the way to work, and several hours back, and all the consequences that implies (e.g. possibly arriving late, having far less free time)? No, you don't, you drive to work instead because you want that more than walking, all other things being equal.
It is necessarily true that if you do something, you want to do it (more than any other alternative). This is what economists care about. This is by definition. You are losing a by definition argument.
People do want to drive to work, otherwise they wouldn't do it. The fact that they spend time driving to work, and even plan ahead to be able to do so, necessarily implies that they want to. This is the economist's definition of "want", and the fact it is something they spend time planning to do means it is a need (need = highest ranked want at any given point in time).
Therefore the rest of your argument cannot follow. Nor is there any real basis for your arguments that follow, there's a long precedence for privately owned and maintained roads, even today in the US. It was among the first forms of commercial transportation, even (it was things like canals that have historically been government-funded, not roads!).
Why it matters is because public versus private goods is the entire point the cited passage. You started this by arguing that air somehow was a non-scarce good (i.e. can potentially be used up until there is "no more air left"). In doing so you provided an example of a free public good, which is neither scarce, nor rivalrous, nor excludable, as the passage requires. Do you have half a brain to be able to rationalize the fact that no matter how hard we breathe, we cannot "use up" the air like we use up hamburgers or freeways? Did that even cross your mind, yes or no?
You don't need HTML to use any of the APIs, they're just APIs that any library could choose to implement. DOM, WebRTC, IndexedDB, Canvas, RDF Interfaces, and plenty more all have notable non-Webbrowser implementations. You don't actually even need ECMAScript, the definitions are specified with WebIDL specifically so they can be implemented in Java and C++, too: DOM API is pretty much the standard API for reading XML data in any programming language that has an XML parser (it's the one that specifies getElementById, etc).
And bear in mind there's other ECMAScript APIs too. Khronos Group defines UInt8Array, etc, designed for use with GL. But you don't find that in ECMA-262.
Because those are ECMAScript APIs which have nothing to do with HTML.
WebRTC is not "HTML5". It's an ECMAScript API, and you can use it in any ECMAScript environment with the API, including any HTML version, and hopefully, in the future, desktop applications.
The American Revolution was won because the Americans had access to weapons as good or better than the British military.
The second amendment exists precisely to protect one from governments, anything less is auxiliary.
I'm making the subtle point yes, yes it unconstitutional. Because the use of them against innocents is already illegal, so how could mere possession be? And consider, you can make "chemical and biological weapons" with stuff under your sink.